Employers are showing interest in recruiting temporary foreign workers left out of work after the permanent ban imposed on the agricultural producer who hired them. However, the employer transfer on a work permit takes so long that most of these migrant farm workers prefer to return to Guatemala.
The Devoir revealed last week that Jean Lemay’s farm is the first Quebec company to be banned for life from accessing the temporary foreign worker program. This ban is also accompanied by a fine of $ 198,750. His farm in Saint-Jude, Montérégie, is also owed thousands of dollars in wages and unpaid vacation pay.
Mr. Lemay is also facing multiple investigations by various police and government entities and was convicted last April of possession of property obtained by crime. Jean Lemay did not respond to our repeated calls.
Three employers contacted us after the publication of these articles which described some of the difficulties these 19 Guatemalan fathers have faced in recent months.
The problem is that they have temporary permits linked to a single farm, that of Jean Lemay, the very one who can no longer employ them. The employer transfer does exist, but it takes at least two months, or even six months in the longest cases, says Denis Roy, immigration consultant for the Union des producteurs agricoles (UPA).
The process of recruiting and hiring a temporary foreign worker indeed involves several stages, “and you have to practically start from the beginning”, he explains.
An employer must first demonstrate that they have taken steps to hire local workers and request a new Labor Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). For this stage alone, the average processing time is currently 32 working days in the agricultural component of the temporary foreign worker program, or more than a month and a half.
To this, we must then add the delays to have a Quebec acceptance certificate and an Ottawa work permit. “Some delays have improved since the start of the pandemic, but it is still very long,” recognizes Mr. Roy.
“We have been through a lot of stress in the last few months and we want to find our families,” Carlos Mendez, one of the workers in the group of 19, said last week. The delay of several months before receiving the next paycheck , seems to him quite simply “inaccessible”.
“The transfer of employers with these deadlines simply does not work,” says Michel Pilon, coordinator of the Support Network for migrant agricultural workers in Quebec who supports this group.
Jobs available “tomorrow morning”
Jenny Ann Gagnon, vice-president of the Belle-de-Jour greenhouses, has trouble understanding the delays in obtaining an employer transfer for this type of worker. “We tell them to denounce abuses, but the deadlines are so long then, it’s impossible to do something. By moving slowly, the government keeps them in a difficult situation, ”she said.
His company could currently offer employment to at least two of the 19 workers who survived the farm. Located in Saint-Nazaire near Alma in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, the Belle-de-Jour greenhouses are specialized in the production of flowers, ornamental plants and vegetable plants. If they have been hiring temporary foreign workers since 2013, they want to go from 12 to 19 this year with production growing.
“I don’t understand how people treat them badly. It’s not complicated, if they’re not here, I’ll close! I owe them the survival of our company ”, says Mr.me Gagnon.
“My client would have jobs tomorrow morning,” said Geneviève Plamondon, human resources consultant for the firm Go RH. Owner of several factories producing packaging in Montreal, this man urgently needs day laborers.
“We find this whole story very sad, at a time when we see more and more employers with ‘fires’ to put out, that would kill two birds with one stone,” she continues.
“There are other excellent employers who could offer them better conditions with salaries above the minimum”, supports her colleague Vicky Lacroix, director of the Estrie office for the same company.
Towards a sectoral permit?
The UPA adopted a resolution calling for work permits to become “sectoral” at its annual congress last week: “The mobility of these workers must increase, so we would like them to be able to change employers, while remaining in the agricultural sector, ”explains Denis Roy.
The Federal Minister of Agriculture, Marie-Claude Bibeau, assured during a speech at the same congress that “major reform of temporary foreign worker programs is underway”.
She also said that with Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, and Carla Qualtrough, Minister of Employment, they should “soon be in a position to put in place significant administrative relief” for exemplary employers, a request for long standing of the UPA.
“And we will tighten the screws on the others,” she added.
Some workers’ rights groups are going further and calling for an open permit on arrival, as well as better routes to permanent residence.
The proposal was brought to Ottawa before the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration in June 2021, notably by Jenny Kwan of the NDP. “The granting of immigrant status should be the general rule,” the party wrote in a dissenting report.
For the UPA, an open permit or a residence are not yet solutions on the table: “We do not want to become a pool of recruitment at a discount for other economic sectors because the workers are numerous and accessible here. “